Condition Based Maintenance:
the impact on production

The need for Condition Based Maintenance

All Itho Daalderop’s products are produced at a single factory at Tiel, in the Netherlands. As explained in Why Itho Daalderop adopted Smart Manufacturing, the production and distribution chain has recently changed to a Make to Order process, requiring great flexibility. As Production Manager, Richard van Gelder, explains, “On demand production means that no single week is the same, …but I can say that we produce between 8000 and 12,000 products per week. And that is in all the product variants, from a complex heat pump to a very simple cover for a ventilation unit.”

With Make to Order, the reliability of the production facilities has become mission critical. Operating a corrective maintenance strategy, whereby repairs are conducted once machines have broken, is no longer acceptable. A Condition Based Maintenance strategy, enabled by innius, is the solution.

Virtual sensors and dashboards

Itho Daalderop’s implementation of innius is a testament to the platform’s adaptability to the specific business needs of users. Condition Based Maintenance with innius would usually be conducted by setting up rules on physical and virtual sensors, to trigger alert notifications to users’ mobile devices. But because Itho Daalderop’s maintenance team work in close proximity to the production line and aren’t equipped with mobile devices, they decided to simply display virtual sensors on hanging dashboards in both the production area and maintenance office.

Control Engineer, Gerard van Gelderen, has been responsible for programming the virtual sensors and dashboards. He says, “At the moment, we’re mostly using the sensors or virtual sensors with some scripts behind them. Scripts are easy to apply, and if you get stuck, you can get help from innius. I think the most useful function of innius, is the ability to make virtual sensors, whereby you don’t need to get all the functionality out of the PLC but can keep that in the online environment.” And also, “By taking the dashboards that we as Maintenance Engineers use, and hanging these up in the production area, we can create insight for the people on the production line.”

Condition Based Maintenance in practice

A change in the working relationship between the production and maintenance teams, probably isn’t the first thing which springs to mind when talking about Condition Based Maintenance. But at Itho Daalderop this is a clear development. In the past, the maintenance team was dependent upon feedback about the machines from production line operators, often once a machine had broken down. The change is that the dashboards provide them both with deep insights into production line status and machine behavior, indicating issues with machines before they actually break. Production and maintenance teams are therefore much less dependent upon each other, and maintenance work can be planned outside of production hours where possible.

Gerard van Gelderen says, “The problems which we can see now, we see earlier than the Production team, whereby we can react more quickly to breakdowns or the breakdowns which are coming. We can see on the dashboard that a sensor or a value has gone above a certain threshold, and from there we can respond. The advantage of that is that you don’t need to constantly be at your workplace to stay up to date with how the machine is running at that moment. By quickly getting insight about the machine, we can reduce the Mean Time To Repair, and increase the Mean Time Between Failure. The advantage of that is that the standstills have been reduced to almost zero.”

Production Manager, Richard van Gelder adds, “The data allows me to see how my process is running, how the steps are going, what the working times are, what the Mean Time To Repair might be and thus where bottlenecks, potential improvements are, and for the Maintenance Engineers, the reliability can be monitored. They see, that a machine is going to break, so we’re going to plan some preventative maintenance. And I want planned maintenance, not ad hoc stoppages; because then my delivery reliability becomes insecure.”

How could Condition Based Maintenance change your production? Contact us today to find out.